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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 9, 2001
On leadership
As I began last week I begin this with a little preface. I am aware that I have been writing these last few Sundays on a level of controversy seldom sustained in a daily newspaper. The times are extraordinary and I am writing to the times. How many things that seemed peripheral now are central to our everyday lives. How many things ignored must now be confronted. For notwithstanding a pretentious speech by the Governor General the other week -- to me and a room full of sycophantic journalists -- a speech in which she said "nothing changed on Sept. 11" -- it would be truer to say that everything changed. Almost everyone is now looking at the world from a new angle; the rest are living in denial. On Sept. 11 we all had a brush with death we all received a memento mori. Some thousands were killed in the collapse of Manhattan's tallest skyscrapers. Some tens of thousands were miraculously saved because the towers held up just long enough to evacuate them. And within moments we realized -- we the hundred millions who were watching -- that the people who could do that who could fly those planes into the buildings who could commit such a gratuitous evil would do more if they could. That they will do more if they can. They will poison infect irradiate whole cities if they can find the means; and each of us must answer in his heart how we shall respond. There was genius in the choice of target and in the method used to take it down. It is hard to imagine a better way -- observing all the "dramatic unities" of Aristotle -- to get our full attention. Except for the heroic firemen and police the victims were people just like us who went to their offices one bright and clear and mild and vivid September morning. But for the grace of God we could have taken their places. At the moment of impact we Canadians and Americans were as one; as all the civilized world was suspended in the unity of our horror. "Nous sommes tous Americains!" was the expression used in Le Monde in Paris. But from that day forward we began to go our divergent ways. Some will rise to an occasion others will fall. There is a long history before the moment but it is in the moment we discover who we are. There was a parallel in World War II. Britain under inspiring leadership stood the whole course of the war against an enemy that was hideously evil. France saddled with weak and demoralized leaders capitulated in the moment of her test. Of course France was also struck the harder blow; but to this day more than half a century later France feels great pain in her memories of the conflict of the part all but a few of her people felt constrained to take. She still feels torn she still feels the legacy of some proud moments but many more of shame. It was Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain who agreed to lead France in collaboration with the Nazis who turned his energies to convincing his countrymen that really nothing had changed. Who told his people they should go back to work to business as usual. (And pay no attention as we round up the Jews.) Who told them that France would go on as before albeit under German occupation; that nothing distinctly French would be sacrificed. (Only her honour.) He had been a hero of the Great War; but now he was an old warhorse saved by an historical mistake from the glue factory. A man broken in his spirit yet set in power. I have come to think of our prime minister Jean Chretien as a kind of Marshal Petain. The comparison is unfair in many dimensions -- for one thing Mr. Chretien was never a hero; for another he never had the Marshal's excuse. He lacks the culture and elegance the strange and tragic grace the sorrow in Marshal Petain's demeanour. He was never confronted by a German blitzkrieg; his surrender was never required; so that he had to go out of his way to tell Edmonton's Princess Patricias that he would never allow them to be exposed to danger; that there is no cause for which we will fight. In contrast like so many Canadians I tend to think now of George W. Bush as having something in him of Winston Churchill. (The younger Bush chose Churchill as a personal hero years ago; who knows what heroes Mr. Chretien chose?) From the first moments of the conflict the president knew what he was about. He gathered in what had happened the scale of what had happened. He knew who he was and what he was called upon to do. He grasped as a leader that this was no ordinary challenge that it had become the reason for his life. He did not even look at polls before he began acting and speaking. In the United States a person many feared would prove a weak president soon showed the most impressive qualities of leadership and continues to do so. He has made mistakes he will make mistakes as Churchill also made mistakes; but he will not lose his hold on the big picture. He has seemed to rise right out of himself to become a giant of a man. And the American people have been galvanized by this leadership they have themselves risen to the occasion summoned the will to fight. Even the polls confirm they will not be distracted from their commitment: they know they too are put to the test. They know who they are -- Americans -- what being an American means. Whereas we are at a loss we really don't know who we are and there is no one who speaks for us. We are mere spectators in our own fate. We get mixed signals from our craven rulers. History does not repeat itself as I have so often said: only the mistakes are repeated and repeated. There is no reprise in this instance of the events that followed from the 1930s. But this much can be said. At the moment when we were both called to rise the U.S. found it had a Churchill we found -- well I wouldn't go that far. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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